by Rick Bragg
It is why, when I have done good in my life, I have given her the trophies. They sit in dust on her shelves. From time to time I fail, and she says the right thing then, too.
“Son,” she says, “I don’t need a plaque to know what kind of man you are.”
And that is why I love her.
MY BROTHER’S GARDEN
Southern Living, Southern Journal: May 2012
My little brother’s beard has turned gray, and his clothes hang on him like a scarecrow’s hang on crossed broom handles. From a distance, there in the rising dust of the garden, he looks like he stepped out of an old family photograph, like my uncles, like my grandfather, men who knew the secrets of the dirt. He reaches down and pinches a false bloom off a squash. I do not know how he knows it is false. When I ask him these things, he just looks at me, puzzled, and says, “I’ve always knowed.” Today, every day, his rows are straight as a needle, immaculate. You could roll a marble across his ground. I watch him stoop to pull a single, solitary weed, and then I ease away, thinking: If you know, how come I don’t?
The South, like chiggers and divinity candy, is everlasting. It will always be, though it will not always be as we remember. The South of our childhoods rusts, peels, and goes away. Brush arbors have left no trace on it. Preachers who thrust ragged Bibles at bare rafters now shout politics from the pulpit. Civility, toward even those with whom we do not agree, is an heirloom. Quilts, the kind made for warmth instead of cash, are a thing of antiquity, their patterns a mystery slowly fading in an old woman’s eyes. Young men can play 5,000 video games but cannot sharpen a pocket knife; lost are the men who tested their truck’s electrical system by holding to a coil wire. I listen for the past, but I cannot hear it. The juke joints fall silent, cotton mills wind down to a final, solitary thread, and a last buck dancer shuffles off into the mountain mist. Then I see my brother Mark in his garden, and know that not everything must fade away.
I can still see my maternal grandmother, Ava, go at a copperhead with a hoe held together with black electrical tape; it never had a chance. My paternal grandfather, Bobby, worked 12 hours milling cotton, six more with his hands in red dirt. My uncle John wore out 15 straw hats and worked three tractors to death. Now it is Mark’s turn, to curse the drought, and the late frost, and the rocks in the earth.
Five years ago, he hacked and burned clean an acre of hedge- and weed-infested land, mixed the ashes with a prodigious amount of manure, and created an oasis in a rock-strewn mountain pasture. Now, season after season, he walks down the hill with an old, white German shepherd by his side—he named her Pretty Girl—and does battle with the things that would take it all away: a blight that appears overnight like a bad dream; and hungry insects, some he cannot even name. The old dog watches from a cool place in the dirt, and when thunder sounds in the distance she steps in front of my brother’s tractor and will not move, to tell him it is time to go in before the lightning gets there. A good dog will do that.
Because, you see, there is more than science at work here. He knows the science, the nature of the soil, how to plant—how far apart, how deep—and the hybrids and histories of seeds. But there is also magic—what some folks call folklore—that must be considered, like the singing of frogs, the stages of the moon. Most, I will never understand. For some reason, he named his tractors after family. The one called Ricky is slow to start, has a bad running gear, and its seat has no padding.
People here say they have never seen a more beautiful garden, of peppers, onions, potatoes, squash. His tomatoes line our mama’s windowsills. The canning process takes all summer and much of the fall, her house thick with the smell of vinegar and dill. I forget how pretty a jar of hot peppers can be.
But I guess everyone here has a Mark. Look behind the redbrick ranchers or frame houses or mobile homes and you will see a patch of turned dirt. In it, staring down as if they can divine the future, will be a Southern woman or man. When all else is torn down, or new, this is how I’ll know where I am.
PRETTY GIRL
Southern Living, Southern Journal: May 2014
Her name was perfect.
She came to them in the dead of night, in the cold. She was more than half dead, starved down to bones, her hair completely eaten away by mange. She had been run off from more than one yard when she finally crept into an empty doghouse in the trees beyond my mother’s yard. At least she was out of the wind.
They found her, my mother and brother, in the daylight of the next day. They could not even tell, at first, she was a dog.
“And it broke my heart,” my mother said.
They did not call the vet because she knew what the vet would do. She was too far gone to save; any fool could see that. My mama lives in the country and has to run off two wandering dogs a week, but this time, “I just couldn’t. She couldn’t even get up.” How do you run off a dog that cannot stand?
The broke-down dog had stumbled on two people who hate to give up on anything, even a month-old newspaper. They save batteries that have not had a spark of anything in them for a long, long time. My mother keeps pens that stopped writing in 1974. My point is, there is always a little use, a little good, a little life left in anything, and who are they to decide when something is done for good.
My brother Mark looked at her, at her tragic face, and named her.
“Hey, Pretty Girl,” he said.
It was like he could see beyond the ruin, or maybe into it. I don’t know.
Her hips were bad, which was probably why she was discarded in the first place, and her teeth were worn down. Her eyes were clouded. But they fed her, and gave her water, and bathed her in burnt motor oil, the way my people have been curing the mange for generations. They got her looking less atrocious, and then they called the vet.
The vet found she had heartworms. She was walking dead, anyway, at her age. It was then I saw her, still a sack of bones. It would be a kindness, I told my mother, to put her down. She nodded her head.
A month later I pulled into the driveway to see a beautiful white German shepherd standing watch at the front of the house. It was not a miracle; her ailments did not magically cease. But together, my mother and brother had tended her, and even let her live in the house. She ate people food, and drank buttermilk out of an aluminum pie tin. She was supposed to last, at most, a few weeks or months. She lived three more years—decades, in dog years—following my brother to the garden to watch for snakes and listen for thunder.
“I prayed for her,” my mother said. “Some people say you ain’t supposed to pray for a dog, but…” And then after the gift of years, Pretty Girl began to fail, and died. She is buried in the mountain pasture.
The hot weather will be on us soon. The garden is already planted. Some things were planted according to science, according to soil and weather. And some things were planted according to lore, the shape of the moon, and more. That is fine with me. There are things we cannot explain, things beyond science, like how a man could name a ravaged and dying dog, and have her rise inside that, somehow, to make it true.
CRAZY CAT LADY
Southern Living, Southern Journal: September 2014
I know my mother was saddened when she recently lost her dog.
That is no reason to fill the hole in her heart with 13 cats.
“I am ashamed of myself,” she admitted.
It is not her fault; this evil was visited upon her. A friend, well-meaning but ill-reasoned, brought her a cat that had not been fixed. Let the hilarity commence.
They named the smoke gray cat Stinky, because it was.
“We thought it was a boy,” said my brother Mark.
But along came a raggedy stray tomcat my mother named Will.
“He was a travelin’ man,” Mark said.
Will begot, with Stinky, four kittens: Little Will, Shorty, Little Stinky, and Elvira. “Elvira?” I asked. “I liked the song,” Mark said.
Will, his work done, hit the highway. Another stray, Big Spooky, moved in.
Before Stinky—who was now referred to as Big Stinky—could be caught and fixed, Big Stinky delivered into this world a second litter: Little Spooky, Vincent Price, and Stephen King.
“I been watchin’ spooky movies,” Mark said.
A fourth kitten had Siamese markings.
“Possum Willy,” my mother said, “because he looks like a…”
“I got it,” I said.
Shorty, who was also believed to be a boy, produced a litter.
“Haven’t named them yet,” Mark said.
The problem in this narrative—well, one of them—is that Little Stinky soon eclipsed Big Stinky in size, making Little Stinky Big Stinky and Big Stinky Little Stinky, so that I can no longer adequately follow what is happening.
I so miss that dog. Don’t worry—a veterinarian will soon be involved, lest there be any mean letters. (If there are any, send them to the Editor in Chief.) I told my mother we will try to cut her cat population off at 13 by first spaying the females. But the cats are half wild, and most of them will let only her touch them, and she is too old for cat wrangling. Mark, who I suspect enjoys naming them way too much, will probably not step forward. My older brother, Sam, is too deliberate. A deliberate man cannot catch a cat. There are just some things a steady man cannot do.
I wonder who that leaves.
But I fear it is already too late. My mother is now the crazy cat lady. Cats hang on the screened doors, mewling for food, which she buys in big bags. The cats share it with the raccoons and possums, a kind of modern-day Noah’s Ark there on her 40 acres of mountain pasture.
Her driveway is about a quarter-mile long. She walks to the mailbox, for her health.
“Now they all follow her in a straight line, all of them, there and back,” my brother told me.
“I am ashamed of myself,” my mother reiterated.
“You’ve just got a soft heart,” I said.
“They swirl and swirl ’round my feet,” she said.
I patted her.
“I didn’t even like cats,” she said.
There ain’t enough pats in the world.
We cannot give away even one cat. People promise to take one, and we watch the driveway.
They never come. But another stray did, a kitten.
“Sylvester Highstockings,” Mark said.
I told him I did not want to know.
THE PORCH
Southern Living, Southern Journal: August 2012
The old house has started to fade inside my mind. I try to remember it but the walls are mostly blank, the hallways filled with shadow. The fights, hugs, prayers, and curses that occurred there still linger in my memory, but the wooden boxes that held those things, the rooms my paternal grandparents once shared with their great extended family, have lost form. I think it was painted white, that house. It seems like it was white.
But the porch, now...I still see the porch. The last time I stood upon it I was 6 years old, but I still see the nail heads in the weathered pine, still hear the squeal of the rocker pressing the planks, still see tiny comets arc across the air when somebody flicked the glowing nub of a Pall Mall over the rail and into the night.
I remember that it was wide and deep, as high off the ground as a man is tall. The planks, once painted, were worn down to a bare, ancient gray by rain and sun, and by a few billion brogans, black wingtips, and scandalous high-heeled shoes. But it was built to stand until the Rapture, and maybe a little while beyond.
They say a kitchen is the heart of a house, but I believe the porch is its soul. From the very steps, you knew if you were welcome or not, knew everything you needed to know about the people inside. My grandmother Velma welcomed the whole world there on those boards, except for a few insurance men and anyone with a pamphlet. Usually, she welcomed them with a saucer of blackberry cobbler, or banana pudding, or a plate of the best meatloaf this world has ever known. My grandfather Bobby, if it was a weekend and the world had not run out of whiskey, sometimes welcomed visitors with something more, but that is another story.
The porch was always cool, as if summer stopped at that first step. The house was like a furnace in the hot months, and the porch, perched in the foothills of the Alabama highland, was a cool oasis in the heat. There was no electric light on the porch, no bright bulb to draw insects or add to the heat. Porches were for talking, and rocking babies, and cutting okra and snapping beans and telling lies. A body did not need a lot of light for that, and—if the lying got out of hand—the darker the better.
I remember its scent, an ambrosia of black coffee mixing in the wind with the sweet smell of canned milk, and honeysuckle, and snuff. It made the babies sneeze. In the evening, the children would retreat beneath the porch to be away from their mamas and daddies but still not quite away, to be with them and yet not right with them, which is a delicious thing that only a child really understands. We convened there to whisper, pinch, fuss, eavesdrop, and enjoy the dark, our heads filled with ghost stories and our fists wrapped around our broken-bladed pocket knives. But then a screech owl would split the night, or a cousin would mutter, “I wonder if there’s snakes down here,” and we would come pouring from around the pylons and up the steps.
I don’t see people on porches much anymore. For a while they even stopped building them after air-conditioning, and television. I see people sitting around on patios, but it is not the same. But people seem to like them. As the late writer Lewis Grizzard once wrote, it is hard to get drunk and fall off a backyard.
Like most people, I have a dream house under construction in my head. The plans shift and reform and sometimes I even scratch out a few lines with pencil on a legal pad, but I always tear it up and start over. I have been building it all my life, slow evening after slow evening. If I had worked with bricks and lumber instead of dreams and paper, I would be sitting about 19 stories high by now. Maybe I should find a good architect. Or maybe I should just get one last, clean sheet of paper, and start with a porch. I already have one in mind.
TAKE YOUR MEDICINE, BOY
Southern Living, Southern Journal: February 2015
The boy was trouble. You could see that as he pushed through the door, then came stomping past the booths in the Huddle House in his toddler-size cowboy boots. He was wearing a strawberry-jelly scowl, his shirt had ridden up his belly, and his hands, which I am sure were sticky, were touching everything. His tired mother noticed, too late, that he was on the lam, and caught up with him just about the time he made it to our booth. His round cheeks were red—it was clear he had a cold—and he sneezed and then coughed a good-bye as he was dragged away.
“Reminds me of you,” my brother Sam said over his ham-and-cheese omelet.
My mother nodded.
“You was bad to get colds,” she said, and watched as the boy went, protesting, up the aisle. She loves boys.
Well let’s hope, I thought to myself, they don’t treat his ailment the same way my people treated mine. If they do, the poor child will be as tight as Dick’s hatband by time for beddy-bye.
They called it, oddly, a “toddy.” Their homemade remedies for the cold, flu, and croup varied a little, depending on which grandparents were mixing the concoctions, but the active ingredient was always the same. It required, to start, a few tablespoons of corn whiskey, which some people—but nobody I know who’d ever had any—called moonshine. Hooch was more like it. Busthead. Popskull. There wasn’t anything nice about it.
Into the glass the old women of the family squeezed a lemon, if they had one; lemons were dear in the foothills of the Appalachians in those days, for mill workers and pulpwooders and roofers. Then, they stirred in a tablespoon of golden honey.
If there was no honey, they took a hammer and broke off a big chunk of peppermint candy and let it melt in the glass. Sometimes, if the child coughed loud enough and their hearts broke and their fear rose, they would place the chunk of peppermint in the toe of a white sock and bash it with the hammer, or just swing it against a post on the porch. I
t melted quicker that way, beat to dust.
I remember once they gave this medicine to my brother Sam.
He said he did not remember it.
“I reckon so,” I said.
He does remember he went to sleep.
My mother recalls there was giggling.
I do remember the first time they gave it to me. I am not sure how old I was, but I was in school, so had to have been at least 6. The peppermint did not do the job, and the corn whiskey burned a hole from my lips to my lower intestine, but, oh, what a wonderful feeling it was when the fire went out. The world went soft. The world turned gold. I floated. I flew into the dark. Moonshine. I get it now.
I know they would not have hurt us for anything in the world. Nothing was more precious, to these people who worked so hard with their hands for so little, than their babies. They simply used what they had.
I am glad that little boy in the Huddle House lives in a more enlightened time, but maybe just a little sorry, too.
TIME FOR THE YEAR’S BEST NAP
Southern Living, Southern Journal: November 2012
The turkey carcass is down to bones. The mashed potatoes are nothing more than a sad, hopeful, metallic scraping—some people just can’t accept that gone is gone. The pinto beans and ham are in Tupperware, divided 14 ways. The last biscuit is a memory. (Or so it seems. My mama always hides one or two away for my boy, Jake.) Over the last crumbs of dressing, old women say, “Don’t know what happened…it just wasn’t fit to eat.”
It is time for my people to gather in the living room and unburden themselves of all the fine gossip they have been holding onto since September, like money. I will be there, with them, sometimes with a half-eaten piece of chocolate cake balanced dangerously on one knee, but I will hear almost none of it.
